Any chance you’re a Doomberg reader? I’ve followed his recent writing and interviews on peak oil and I also enjoyed this Peak Prosperity video [1] arguing in opposition, looking at the short lifetime of fracked oil fields and lack of big post-Permian deposit finds. Also, oil is necessary as feedstock and in manufacturing infrastructure for oil alternatives.
Still, it’s frustrating that there’s such a disagreement on basic facts between two quantitative and careful thinkers.
I’m convinced that “density” is not a helpful metric here. There’s plenty of diffuse energy, and it’s advantageous to collect it near where it’s used, rather than make big pipes and ship it around
Disagree. Solar doesn’t work at night and it’s horribly inefficient to have a bunch of local batteries everywhere compared with centralized power generation with relatively cheap wiring distributing the centrally generated energy. Local generation is a greedy solution (I got mine) that has a shared cost (centrally generated power for those who can’t generate their own spikes massively in price). It’s basically a greedy “rich get richer” solution that also doesn’t actually solve the carbon problem because other people need electricity too.
I don’t see how fossil can be considered efficient when you have to consider digging it up, shipping it around, refining it, shipping it around again, burning it, piping the electricity for long distances. and if you want to argue that solar installations advantage the rich, surely you have to count the supply chain capital involved in fossil fuels! Solar plus battery is cheap and getting cheaper. “Inefficient” battery storage just means you need another panel. Every step of the fossil fuel supply chain is capital-intensive, land-intensive, and dirty
Always this "horribly inefficient" claim. Yet, several advanced economies are doing it. You think you're smarter than the power industry economists who say batteries are OK?
Basically, have you tried considering you might be .. wrong?
Source? Also, I think you may be replying to something I didn’t say. What I said was that installing batteries on each house is going to be less efficient than installing grid-scale batteries because you will end up over installing the amount of capacity you need initially so that you never go dark on the off chance you pull more power. Or you use a grid hookup as a backup in which case you end up kinda of parasitic where you don’t pay for the grid but rely on it being there to offload the responsibility of providing differential power when your home solution isn’t meeting your needs (this is expensive because the grid has non trivial maintenance costs that you’re not contributing to). Households will inevitably anlso under provision in the long term due to unaccounted for energy growth (eg EV vehicles). It’s also going to be more expensive because people who don’t have the capital to install their own batteries will be stuck paying the bill for grid scale batteries and maintenance anyway while richer households get to avoid that cost due to their own solar install.
As for grid scale batteries, they do remain prohibitively expensive - even nuclear with massive cost overruns handily beats solar + batteries. There’s also legitimate questions about whether we can actually manufacture enough batteries to have solar run as baseload power, especially with people adding an insane number of EVs in the coming decades to charge overnight. Remember - you have to recharge the batteries themselves which means you need a bunch of extra solar just to charge the night time batteries which means ~30% more capacity than is rated to handle daytime power otherwise. So 30% larger solar install than we’re building today + more battery capacity than we’ve ever demonstrated the ability to build.
But anyway. You can continue to believe in grid scale batteries as a way to make solar work for baseload but that has nothing to do with what I said about using solar+batteries for individual homes instead of grid scale power.
Have you considered that renewables don’t actually have a track record of replacing baseload power except for wind in some very specific and extremely unique geographic areas? And renewables also have a very poor track record in terms of having any reduction in fossil fuel consumption from the grid? Might be something to try on rather than making appeals to authority and claiming any skeptics are wrong.
Base load is a social construct used by coal and nuclear to justify the economically viable bid model which suits them. You can target the duck curve by batteries, and by demand management. People are perfectly capable of moving significant load in time, as evidenced by time of use charge models and off peak pricing.
More and more solar owners here in Australia deploy a battery when they can afford it and in Victoria the state government is funding solar and battery deployment for social housing.
Almost no new wind or solar can be deployed at scale in Australia now without battery deployment. Both individuals and grid scale batteries are fine. They serve different parts of the supply chain.
FCAS can be supplied by batteries and reactive loads by condensers.
Base load is a debating point. It's the load we can't currently supply from renewables. When we can, coal, oil, gas and nuclear may become uneconomical stranded assets. Nuclear would presumably last the longest because of the sunk cost of public money.
Networks are, and always were a public utility function. Converting to bid models was a huge mistake.
For grid power, nuclear and hydro beat oil by significant margins. For shipping we’d need to deploy nuclear reactors that could be safe to operate on the seas. For cars and trains, electrified tied to a fossil free grid is enough and is happening however slowly. For planes and land shipping trucks that’s trickier and not sure what the answer there would be. But if we cut shipping, grid and automotive fossil fuels we’d be reducing global emissions to almost 0. It’s not enough at this point due to unlocked runaway effects meaning the 1.5C warming is long in our rearview in terms of being an unavoidable result and it’ll take us a long time to transition based on the current political approaches which means I suspect 3C or even worse is highly likely within the next 50 years.
Beyond arresting the worsening conditions (which we’re failing at spectacularly) I’m not sure how to unwind the damage. Technology is unlikely to save us unless we get insanely lucky somehow (like fusion reactors that are trivial to scale and trivial to make cheaply and then shoving all that energy into carbon recapture at a scale we don’t know how to do because even at current levels it’s diffuse enough that it takes a long time to capture a small amount of carbon).
Ultimately we’re going to need to get lucky on grid decarbonization (recent solar PV and wind bulldouts, particularly in China, are an incredibly welcome sign that this is happening.) And I’m afraid we might also need to do some kind of geoengineering. I’m much more nervous about the second part, because the first seems to be on an economic glide path that might make it self-fulfilling. But the second relies on a lot of coordination that might not happen.
Nuclear is like 2,000,000 times more dense than oil and it's perfectly safe with proper engineering. Far more people have died harvesting oil, nevermind the geopolitical problems with it, and far more people have died from coal mining than nuclear power plant disasters.
Nuclear alone is enough to sustain civilization nearly infinitely.
Meanwhile, natural gas is plentiful, geothermal is plentiful, solar and wind is plentiful and all of these contribute to energy availability.
Oil still has its uses, it's not going to go away, but I suspect consumption will be reduced by 90% or more in the next 2 decades.
Still, it’s frustrating that there’s such a disagreement on basic facts between two quantitative and careful thinkers.
[1] https://youtu.be/__DEDPhs5O4